Can't wait until the facebook neural net declares me dead because of my sclerotic post activity and my family thinks I've kicked the bucket when they don't get an announcenment on my birthday.

Maybe instead of trying to solve everything with 'artificial intelligence' we ought to design these systems in ways that are less prone to these sorts of misbehaviours. Seems like building systems that work 80% of the time and then hoping that throwing ML engineers at the issue solves the last 20% is the new hot design pattern.

In all seriousness, what do you expect them to do? They can’t have a checkbox “I am dead” for you to click after you pass, so they’re using a bit of data science to try and reduce the heartache of accidentally reminding someone when you might be dead.

I’m no fan of facebook, I don’t have an account and I think they are a net negative in the world, but sometimes they’re just trying to do the right thing, and credit where it’s due

I work in a foreign country, so I guess there's the possibility that remote family might at least be concerned if something like that happened.

>In all seriousness, what do you expect them to do?

give me control over when I broadcast out birthday reminders, because as an infrequent user I would simply turn it off. Problem solved.

Obviously it is not in Facebook's interest to give me control over my feed or activity to this degree, so it will never happen.

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Seeing people wish you happy birthday on there by clicking a button encapsulates how false the narrative is; if the reason you remembered my birthday is that Facebook told you then we don't have a relationship where you should be sending me a birthday message.

The only thing more annoying is that now LinkedIn does it too. That's just weird.

It's only as genuine or fake as you make it be. I'm sure you don't keep in touch with 100% of the people who made positive contributions to your life. You can take this as a less-awkward opportunity to wish them well, and maybe get back in touch if you feel like it, instead of living life as if their existence doesn't matter to you. Or you could not... you could do something else, or you could do nothing if you don't want to do anything with people you don't regularly keep in touch with. It's up to you how real it is and what it means; that you can only think of false narratives for it doesn't mean it is or needs to be that way.

I'll agree that the simple "Happy Birthday" messages people post on facebook are trite, but rather frequently I'm reminded that it's someone's birthday via facebook and then text or call the person.

I'm not the OP, but yes, I have a calendar with people's birthdays in it. Every computer since the 1980's comes with a calendar program, and now they sync to your mobile phone, so there's no need to pass responsibility for that sort of thing to Facebook.

I also send (gasp) paper birthday and Christmas cards to the people who mean a lot to me. And from what they tell me, getting a real card in the mail means a million times more to them, since they know I took time out of my life to think of them and didn't just click a button and move on.

Me too, it's called Facebook.

> I also send (gasp) paper birthday and Christmas cards to the people who mean a lot to me.

Same but for those people who haven't shared their addresses , a Facebook post and/or message suffices.

Nor have I ever asked anyone that sent me a happy birthday text or call how they knew.

What matters is what you do once it's someone's birthday, not how you found out or keep track.

To me this is markedly different than your scenario where Bob nags Alice until she relents and wishes me happy birthday.

Your gcal says "Wish your friends a happy birthday!" above a box it pops up for you to do so?

The difference is that you consciously choose whose birthdays you enter into your calendar. Facebook just assumes anyone you know is close enough.

I surely do. It's not a problem to memorize a few numbers related to the people significant to me enough to send them a birthday message.

The Dunbar numbers go around 3-5, 9-15, 30-45 [0], so even "the 2nd tier" relationships' birthdays are not really that hard to remember

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2004...

Having 100s of relationships isn't real, nobody can actually maintain that many. Trim it down to people you care about and suddenly everything gets better.

The reminder can still be useful though. Once in a while I'll see a reminder for a birthday of someone I would genuinely like to reach out to, and I'll call or text or email them. I still have calendar reminders for birthdays from before all of this when I was meticulously curating my own contact list with birthdays, but Facebook's birthday list is more complete than my old calendar, especially for my younger friends / relatives.

People used to keep this information in their personal planners. How is this different?

Caring enough about that person to write it in a personal planner, and then doing something when you see that reminder is 'the thought that counts'.

LinkedIn is the online version of a collection of business cards. Sending a birthday card is a typical business development practice that is difficult, in my opinion, to take seriously or take much offense from.

I ended up having generic happy-birthday wishes by the same people over and over.

Was pretty embarrassing but my close friends present, who knew my real birthday, said nothing.

I was so flattered by the gesture I didn't have the heart to tell him my birthday was not in May.

Everything about Facebook looks terrible

It's not hard, but you need to know that telling FB that your friend is dead is even an option, then go search for that. For most of us that probably seems pretty simple, but we're definitely the outliers in regards to technical sophistication and knowing how a site 'should' work.

In addition, there's the 'etiquette' of trying to figure out if you, as a friend, should do that, or whether you should leave it to their family, and then wondering if their family even knows about their FB profile, etc.

As the article pointed out, 'there are likely far more accounts that haven't been memorialized' - which suggests that people don't do it.

Facebook surely indexes a lot of the internet, "AI techniques" like entity resolution on obituaries would probably go a long way to finding unreported deaths.

Like the happy memories of my ex-wife which are now a tragedy to me -- that everyday Facebook wants to remind me about. I don't use facebook much.

There should be a filter button such that I can say, "I don't want to hear about this person anymore."

Since there is no way Facebook will get 100% recall: no, it will not stop doing that.